Wall Street stock futures were flat Monday, ahead of the start of what could be a gloomy fourth-quarter earnings season.

Aluminum giant Alcoa will kick off earnings season when it releases its fourth-quarter results after the close of trade.

Here at home, new home prices decreased 0.3% between October and November, Statistics Canada said Monday. This was the second consecutive monthly decrease at the Canada level.

StatsCan said the new housing price index increased year-over-year by 0.7% in November, a slower pace than the 1.5% advance recorded in October and the smallest 12-month increase recorded since August 1999.

The Canadian dollar opened at US83.46¢, down 0.52 of a cent from Friday’s close.

In commodities news, light, sweet crude fell US$1.98 to US$38.85 in electronic premarket trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange.

Overseas, Japanese markets were closed for a holiday, while the Hang Seng Index finished down 2.8% at 13,971.

In midday trading, the UK’s FTSE 100 was down 0.6%, Germany’s DAX index was down 0.3%, and France’s CAC-40 was down 0.4%.

On Friday, the Toronto Stock Exchange ended the first full trading week of 2009 on a down note as news of a rising unemployment rate underscored the deteriorating state of the economy.

The S&P/TSX composite index fell 136.4 points, or 1.5%, to close at 9,085.18. It lost 1.6% for the week.

The descent followed news that Canadian employers cut 34,000 jobs in the month of December — a figure worse than economists had expected.

Junior companies on the TSX Venture exchange bucked the downtrend and moved higher by 9.43 points, or 1.05%, to finish at 908.9.

In New York, U.S. stock markets tumbled after similarly dismal employment news. The U.S. Labour Department reported that nearly 2.6 million jobs were lost in 2008, marking the greatest number of annual losses since 1945.

The Dow Jones industrial average fell 143.28 points, or 1.6%, to 8,599.18. The blue-chip average lost 4.8% for the week.

The S&P 500 index shed 19.38 points, or 2.1%, to end at 890.35, dragged down by financial and energy shares. The index fell 4.5% for the week.

The Nasdaq composite dipped 45.42 points, or 2.8% on Friday, to end at 1,571.59. The index was down 3.7% for the week.

IE